Wikis in the Blogroll

I’m trying to put a link to each of the 7 wikis created by groups in my grad school class at UB.  This would seem to be an easy way to check on their progress.  I have discovered that if they have not “published” their wiki, I can’t do that, even though there seems to be a URL.  (Since I am listed as a collaborator, I have access to all the wikis).  Putting the wikis in my blogroll seems to be a good idea.  I think in the future I put a link in my blog to both studentsblogs and wikis for easily accessing them.

From Wiki to Blog

I have just discovered that posts to a GoogleDocs wiki can be sent to a blog. My grad students in a course on using the Internet have to work in groups of 3 to create a wiki. Each person has to summarize the highlights of a “tool” like Flickr, Hot Potatoes, Survey Monkey, TappedIn, Vocabulary Lookup etc. and tell how they could use the tool in their classroom.

Since they list me as a collaborator, I have access to the blogs and discovered that I can publish wikis to my blog. I’m not going to link their wikis at this time, but I created a “practice wiki” to see how this works.

The steps to posting a wiki to your blog are

1. Click the Publish tab at the top right hand side of the wiki screen.

2. Click on set up your blog site settings where you can choose Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal and others.

3. Enter your ID and password for your blog.

4. Click Post to Blog.

(It seems that you have to first click Publish, but I’m not sure yet).   I’ve noticed that it takes a while for the posting to occur because when I checked immediately, it wasn’t there.  Now many hours later, I checked again, and there is the posting I made to the wiki.

If anyone can think of a good reason for posting a wiki to a blog, please share it.

Learning is about Building a Network.

On Monday Will Richardson gave a presentation as part of the online conference on Connectivism.  An idea that really struck home with me is that learning is about building a network of reliable  sources.  Richardson emphasized that we should model that type of learning for our students and showed a visual of his own network of sources with his blog as the central point of his learning.

That prompted me to create a visual of my own network.  I started a rough outline with a flash program that produces a sort of mind-mapping.  (I’d like to try out other tools for doing this, but haven’t found any other free ones online yet that don’t require downloading something). 

I  think visualizing our own learning networks is something we should all do and encourage our students to do.  It’s a good way to evaluate how we, ourselves,  are learning and for our students, we would be helping them create a personal learning envirmonmnet that could continue to grow after they have left our classes.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to upload the result of the visual I created on bubbl.us.  I cut and pasted the resulting diagram into a word document and tried to upload the document here, but all that appears is the title, not the mind map.  Boy, I wish I had a techie person next door to help with these things!

Connectivism

On Friday George Siemens gave the first presentation in an online conference on Connectivism. I’m going to summarize some of his ideas in the form of answering some relevant questions and then focus on two ideas whose implications made me reflect the most.

What has changed lately? There has been an exponential growth in the amount of information available. We have all moved from having to know “about” topics to having to know “where” to access reliable information on those topics. New avenues for finding that information are growing particularly through the use of the Internet.

What can we do as learners? We cannot make ourselves more intelligent, but we can take two important steps. The first is to let technology do what Siemens’ calls the “grunt work’ for us through services like “tagging” The second is to develop trusted nodes in our personal learning spaces.

What can we do as teachers? We can help students form relevant connections and find trusted nodes. We can become “network administrators” who mange students’ personal networks.

Ideas to Ponder

Diversity of ideas Siemens points out that forming networks that serve merely as “echo chambers” of like-mined individuals will not enhance learning. Although, in my opinion, these nodes could be thought of as the starting point for learning, Siemens points out that cross-pollination among fields and individuals is also indispensable.

He posits that many times a lot of new research is not necessary. It’s out there in other fields. We just need to connect to it by connecting to systems of information not normally in contact with each other.

It’s all about beta mode In discussing the difference between how ideas were shared previously (in academic journals0 with how ideas can be shared today ( in blogs), Siemens used the analogy of a blog space as a canary in a coal mine. Whereas, previously, ideas were published only when the author had polished them to the nth degree, bloggers often express their ideas knowing that from the diversity of comments they will receive, their ideas will become clearer to themselves and others in their network.

Will Richardson gave us an example of all the blogs that he is connected to. I’m going to see if I can insert a Gliffy image here which I will later convert to a an example of who and what I am connected to.

 

 

gliffy_did = “1199607″; embedGliffy();

Blogging from Flock

I haven’t had much time to try out Flock, so this is a test run to see how to blog to WordPress from Flock. I’d also like to see if I can successfully blog to Blogger. I now see that when I click Tools in a Blog Post in Flock, I get a window called Accounts and Services.

There I can add a blog, so I’m going to add my Blogger blog. This finally worked when I realized that to add my updated Blogger account I had to enter my gmail and gmail password for ID and password.

Now I’m wondering if you always have to add the picture before the text when you post from Flocker.

I’m going to try to post this to both my accounts and see what happens.  Well, Word Press worked but for Blogger I GOT AN ERROR MESSAGE!  Darn!  The joys of trying out new programs.

On a happier note, I found a link in Susan Burg’s  posting in Yahoo groups that had a nifty Camtasia demonstration of some of the features of Word Press.  http://freidhof.fts.educ.msu.edu/Movies/Using_Edublogs/Using_Edublogs.html

 

Blogged with Flock

Inserting a Power Point Presentation

 This was a successful attempt to upload a PPt about creating a webquest on Quest Garden to both a post and to the sidebar in Word Press.  Here is the uploaded PPt.    Tips for Quest Garden    The same PPt now also appears in my sidebar.  Here are the steps I followed.

In the Dashboard view of Word Press:
§        Click Write and then Post or Page depending on where you want the PPt.
§        Enter a title.
§        In the area below where you write your post, click browse to find the PPt on your hard drive.
§        Highlight the name of your PPt.
§        Click Open.
§        Give your PPt file a title and description.
§        Choose file to insert in a post or page to have PPt appear in the sidebar.
§        Click Send  to the Editor.
§        Click Publish.

After this endeavor, I tried doing the same operations in Blogger, i.e. inserting a PPt in a post and in the sidebar (template).  I found the process to be much more difficult expecially because it involved the use of html code and I do not know how to create or understand the code.  I can only cut, paste and pray things work!

In Blogger I had to upload the PPt to a host.  I used Ellg.  Then I sent the resulting URL to snipURL and inserted it in this code:
<li><a href= “URLofLink”>Name of PPt</a></li>

The same code worked for the posting and for the sidebar, but the whole process required many more steps than in Word Press. 

Oops, I just noticed that in Blogger I could just click on the link icon while posting and the PPt was linked from Ellg or Slideshare.  So I guess the posting is easy in both types of blogs, but harder to put in a sidebar in Blogger where you have to insert html code.

To Do List

This is just an online reminder for myself of things I want to check out this week.  For each of the following, I’s like to compare the manner of doing the operation in Blogger and in Word Press.

• Inserting a Power Point presentation in a post and in the sidebar.
• Inserting pictures in a post from hard drive and from other sources.  (If I use a creative commons license picture, how do I give credit to the author?)
• Inserting pictures in a profile.
• Embedding videos in posts and sidbars
• Inserting phone pictures in posts.

I also want to read other EVO participants’ blogs and try to leave some comments.

Peace

  I had a chance to express my political opinion  yesterday.  It’s great living near Washington, D.C. because there are so many opportunities to get involved in things you care about.

Here are the steps to upload pictures to a Word Press blog:
1.  Click Write on the dashboard.
2.  Below where you type a message, click Upload.
3.  Click Browse to find a picture on your hard drive.
4.  Click Upload on the button below title and description.
5.  Fill in thumbnail and none.
6.  Click Send to editor.
Your picture should now appear in the window above.  You can now write text to accompany the picture in your post.

Relative Success

First Snow Fall 002.jpg,
originally uploaded by Anciana.

Thanks to Nancy and Patricia for their help in learning how to post pictures directly from Flickr. I chose a template, but some coding shows up above the picture.  Help!!!

Maryanne

Week 2

I just spent some time trying to get familiar with some aspects of Flickr. I had uploaded a few pictures before the course, but had labeled them all friends and family. Yesterday I uploaded 2 views from the balcony of my condo, one before the snow and one after. However, the first snowfall here was laughable. It was really just a dusting of white stuff. Being from Buffalo, NY where snow accumulates up to 2 or more feet, this first snow fall was pretty pathetic.

I looked at the video on Quentin D’Souza’s page about Creative Commons licensing. It’s very well done. I added it to my del.icio.us account.

I just chatted with Bee, Patricia, Illya and another member of our course at TappedIn. We exchanged views aon various issues and our gracious moderators helped me with a few things that stumped me. There is still something I can’t do and that is to configure flickr to post pix and text directly to my WordPress blog. I get to the page that asks for my API endpoint. I entered http://anciana.wordpress.com/xmirpc.php but evidently that isn’t correct because I keep getting an error message. I wanted to put a screen shot of that page here, but I don’t know how to do that. So much to learn, so little time.